Shinjini Dey

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution is unmistakably contemporary—a novel expressing the zeitgeist, if I may. The mode is historical, a fairly popular style for current literary forays into genre, set in the early segments of the too-long nineteenth century, and focused retroactively on the phenomena we live with today: colonial extraction of people and resources, its precipitating wars of resistance and control, and the industrial revol...

I hosted a session on Indian voices in SFF to showcase young and early career writers, asking them about their influences and fears.

No one who lives in a tourist town really likes the tourists who visit. They’re guests, but they deliberately ignore the rules: they ignore the inhabitants, they occupy public squares with language the inhabitant must learn in order to survive, they touch and take things without asking. Yet they fill the state’s coffers. Most people that I knew once in Darjeeling—there is a subjunctive mood to my utterance—expressed their derision in whispers. I learnt the hierarchies. Tourists from the south...

“Once”—so begins Manindra Gupta’s Pebblemonkey (translated by Arunava Sinha), with that portentous word that announces a beginning. To begin at the beginning, perhaps, is characteristic of creation myths, stitching together birth and metamorphosis of a world from a single event. Pebblemonkey, the protagonist of this novel, is an indeterminate creature, a monkey born when a pebble is kicked into a stream, emerging whole to exist among trees and other animals with proper names: predators, hermi...

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072
DECADES AFTER THE fall of the Paris Commune, William Morris’s narrator in News from Nowhere dreams of a future where the commodity form has been abolished: “If I could but see a day of it,” he remarks yearningly; “if I could but see it!” Yet, for years now, the utopian imagination has been not only pronounced dead, but also already transformed from a corpse to a souvenir. That muscle of Marcuse’s making, so lovingly ca...

Yiyun Li’s body of work has been focused on canon, grammar, form, and the demands of love’s labor. Her new novel, The Book of Goose, is no exception. It follows Agnes, a middle-aged woman who decides to write about her childhood in the rural and poor Saint Remy in war-time France, a time of violence where lives were as fatal as they were fated. Perhaps for revenge, or perhaps as a way to alleviate boredom, and even as a...

The ghosts of Dennis Mombauer’s The House of Drought are many, as many as there are allegories. The established fact of extraction, the ritual of sacrifice, the deviance of the unknown—these are its themes. None of these beasts are as powerful as the global narrative that has already been spinning: the irreversibility of climate change wrought through colonial extraction. Thus stands the haunted house of this novella, a colonial building in rural Sri Lanka (Anathakundu, to be exact) that suck...

Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House is a novel about the internet. It announces itself as part of the canon of a recent literary phenomenon called the “new internet novel,” exemplified by works like Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), and Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021). Thousands of words have been written in defining this phenomenon: it is a representation of social media or of the fragmented subjectivity of social media users, it is the lit...

Ali Smith’s recent novel, Companion Piece, is situated in tensions. “Tragedy versus farce,” Smith says, introducing us to a corrupt policeman and the three-headed Cerebrus, an image created by the narrator before she collapses into a loss of meaning. It is yet another year of the pandemic. Pre-existing bigotry is given greater sanctioned proportions and loss of life is marked by an untenable, systemic indifference. And so, Smith artfully crafts another pandemic piece since her previous novel ...

T. Kingfisher’s most recent novel, Nettle & Bone, is a fairy tale, replete with the usual archetypes: a kind-hearted and naïve protagonist, magical companions, difficult siblings—even a villainous tyrant. The narrative follows the adventures of Marra, a thirty-year-old princess who must save her sister from an evil prince. But T. Kingfisher’s stories are rarely ever so straightforward. Her novels stand out from the particular trend in the speculative publishing industry to push for narratives...

There is an urgency in Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf. Each of these fourteen stories, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, are insistent on the act of witnessing, weighed down by the demand to be seen. Moustadraf’s writing is sharp and biting, an...

Adam Soto’s debut, This Weightless World, is a quiet novel, its words wound so tightly that only a sigh escapes the conclusive end. The textual atmosphere is rich, the pace moves across time and universes, and the characters are impossible in the worldliest of ways. Nevertheless, responses to the novel have been tentative, coloured by a sense of thwarted expectations and surprise.
Is this science fiction? Does it tend more towards the speculative? Is it too literary?
This Weightless World is ...

We’re picking ferns for dinner, Mala Didi and I. We’re a few metres beyond the thin perimeter of a bamboo fence — a joke, really — the gaps wide enough for crouching women or our four dogs. We push aside the large fronds and flowerheads and pick the small green whorls of fiddlehead at our feet.
“Don’t take more than three,” Mala Didi instructs as she moves nimbly through the undergrowth, the dogs guiding her step on the incline. “The plant won’t grow back if you do.”
I follow her, knees stain...

Creature or Character
This column is a celebration. SFF has taken in the pulpy mass—bring on the novella, the novelette, the comic book and the B-film, usher in the utopias of erased traditions, garland the metatextual and radical beasts. Modern genre stories reveal the claws of cap...

The Love Makers begins with a two-hundred-page novel by Aifric Campbell, Scarlett and the Gurl. Over the span of a day, on a road trip in the near future, the reader meets two archetypes: a bourgeoise woman named “Scarlett” and a poor woman who calls herself “Gurl,” honouring herself with the universality of gender. They drive through an unnamed country, a landscape ruined by secure and secretive tech-laboratories and offices; they talk to each other about their love affairs and sex, childbir...